segunda-feira, 2 de março de 2009

Why it is important to defend the SSHRC

In an age where business, management and administration graduates, Ph.Ds and scholars have shown poverty of insight in administering public and private wealth, lack of ethical commitment beyond the quick gains of capital markets, and contempt for the economic prosperity of the general public enshrined in their social, educational and white-collar crime police programs, it is imperative that SSHRC funding for non-business related degrees be not only maintained, but increased. In addition, business-related degrees must be subjected to inclusion of humanities electives, given by humanities scholars, whose aim will be to expose business degree students to critical political thought and the catastrophes that their field has contributed to in the past two centuries.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s March 2 appearance on CNN extolling the virtues of Canada’s welfare state is an affront to public sensibilities that have experienced the neoliberal business focused policies he and his government have waged since coming to power.

Non-business sectors of humanities research must refuse to share any part of the blame for the business prompted mess the world economy now faces.N.B. I do NOT receive a SSHRC grant.

To the House of Commons in Parliament AssembledWe, the undersigned residents of Canada, wish to bring to yourattention the following: For more than thirty years, the Social Sciences and Humanities ResearchCouncil (SSHRC) has been promoting and supporting university-basedresearch and training in the humanities and social sciences. SSHRCfunding has been used to complete ground breaking research in countlessareas in Canada and around the world.

The Federal Budget presented on January 27th contains a sentence thathas the potential to halt this kind of research: â€œScholarships grantedby the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council will be focusedon business-related degreesâ€�. These measures are backward and insulting to the thousands of Canadiansthat are students and researchers in the social sciences and humanities.

THEREFORE, we petitioners are calling upon the government to removethis sentence from the 2009 Budget and ensure that SSHRC funding not beallocated to one specific discipline but to the range of studies in thesocial sciences and humanities